AL3 — Meet Toronto’s Prompt-Poet
TORONTO | Poet Marisa Kelly on public vulnerability, spontaneity, and creative community
WORDS BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK
We spend too little time with strangers, and we’re the worse for it. In that respect, art — street art in particular — can be an effective social lubricant to ease that awkward friction that prevents so many otherwise fruitful encounters. Marisa Kelly’s work is a uniquely approachable take on street art that mixes poetry, free association, audience participation, and a dose of radical vulnerability. In the summer of 2022, I had spotted her set-up in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood: a minimalist table equipped with a typewriter and rudimentary signage. Her engagement concept simply asks you to pick a topic, any topic, and she composes a poem on the spot. That is, admittedly, a fairly common execution of “prompt-poetry” but the simple joy of watching an artist work, completely absorbed in a topic you’ve just spontaneously selected, is therapeutic. My topic of choice was “sandalwood” and she ran with it, scattering her fingers across the typewriter with such alacrity that for a moment I wondered if she had a preset of prompt words cued, and “sandalwood” just happened to be one of them.
In Issue 11 of this magazine, our conversation with Anis Mojgani, Poet Laureate of the state of Oregon, yielded a subtle but significant distinction: that between poetry and the poem. Whereby poetry is an entity beyond the poet, and a poet is a poet insofar as they are able to gather this endless poetry into the perforated basket that we call a poem. This opened our eyes to regard the poem as an arrow pointing at the poetry that is always around us, if only we dare tune into it. Perhaps this is the frequency that Kelly tunes into with every prompt she receives.
In tandem with this ethereality is a sort of performance art which Kelly engages through the typewriter. Unable to make use of a backspace button, each word becomes a tattoo on the page, and each mistake proof of her humanity. For this interview, Cannopy Magazine commissioned a poem using the prompt “The Redwing”, borrowed from the title of the fifth song on the album Multitudes by Feist. So strong is our instinct against our fallibility as humans — and perhaps my own editorial instincts against typos — that I unthinkingly asked her to rewrite the poem on account of the misspelling of “chirp” in the fifth stanza. She kindly obliged, pointing out that her poems are often doled out with mistakes and all. And she’s right. We admonish our typos, for the same reason we avoid eye contact with strangers: they’re both glimpses into our vulnerability as spontaneous creatures. And we’re the worse for that.
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